


Elsewheres

by SecondStarOnTheLeft



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, F/M, There are other characters but mostly just cameos and from other canons so, a different fusion every chapter wheeee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 12:36:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 5,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/849645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondStarOnTheLeft/pseuds/SecondStarOnTheLeft
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sansa and Willas, beyond Westeros.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Edge Chronicles - The Slaughterers' Camp

"The Leagues will burn us out if they know we're harbouring this lot," Robb warned, but Sansa just shrugged off his concern – these men were sky pirates, some of the rare few who traded _fairly_ with slaughterers, and for that alone they deserved what help she and Luwin could give them.

Most of the pirates were unhurt in the main – bumps and bruises, sprained ankles and dislocated shoulders, and one hoverworm bite. Sansa treated that before the swelling had spread beyond the little oakelf's elbow, and his effusive thanks and praise made her blush deep purple.

The captain, though – he was young, a fourthling, they told her, and his first mate who was apparently also his younger brother told Sansa that he had been set upon by the Leaguesmaster's personal hammerhead guard.

_The Leaguesmaster's personal guard,_ she thought, giddy with terror as the pirates parted ranks to let her see their captain. _Who are these folk to have upset him of all people?_

The captain was older than Sansa, laying on his front on a hastily put together mound of cloaks and parawings that served as a bed, his head turned to the side so he could breathe. Even with one eye already swollen purple, his lip split and a deep cut curving around his left eye, she could see that he was very handsome.

"We'll have to get him back to the village," she said firmly, motioning for Robb and the others to begin leading the crew back from the grazing pastures. "Luwin, our healer-"

"Moving him may not work," the captain's brother, Garlan, said anxiously. "You said it was screaming that drew you, my lady? It was my brother that screamed."

He carefully lifted the blanket away from his brother's legs, and Sansa's breath caught – a cutlass had cut right to the bone of his left leg, slashing diagonally from the middle of his thigh to the outer side of his knee.

"We may have to remove it," she warned. "And if the Leaguesmaster comes for you, I cannot promise that the elders will not hand you over – we are persecuted enough, sir."

"We would not ask you to defend us," Garlan assured her. "Only to keep my brother alive – please, my lady, the Leaguesmaster has already killed our parents, and he holds our brother and sister prisoner. We owe a ransom that seems impossible to pay if we want them alive, and have been calling in debts all across the Edge in hopes of meeting it. The Leaguesmaster feels slighted, though, so he is attempting to foil us at every turn. _Please,_ my lady, any aid you can offer him would be much appreciated, and genorously rewarded, I swear it on my honour as a Tyrell of Undertown."

Sansa hesitated, looking from the captain's bloody ruin of a leg to her own fingers, deep red and quick and strong.

"You will not double-cross us, just because we are slaughterers?" she demanded.

"Never, lady – my father traded often with the slaughterers, although perhaps not with your village. Two of your kind serve in our crew, as well, and many more across our fleet – we bear you no ill will because of your vocation, I swear that to you now."

Sansa looked down at the captain's leg again, and then she sighed.

"Very well," she agreed. "What is your brother's name?"

"Willas," Garlan said, visibly relieved. "And yours, lady?"

"No lady," she said, pulling a long silver knife from her medicine bag and starting work on the captain's – Willas' – trousers. "Just plain Sansa Stark of Coldoaks."


	2. Skulduggery Pleasant - Roarhaven, Ireland (possibly Co. Wicklow)

Her Surge had hit just six weeks after Dad was killed, four days after Mam and her brother were killed, and with it her powers increased tenfold.

Six years later, she watched the shadows coil and shift as she moved, marvelled for the hundreth time at the force contained in her dainty little bracelet, and snapped out her left hand.

The wall collapsed the moment her shadows struck.

It did it silently, though, a thick bed of inky shadow cradling the bricks as they crumbled, and she breathed out a sigh of relief. If magical alarms had been set, so be it – for some mad reason, she was convinced that she could win, that none could possibly stand between her and her vengeance-

“Sansa,” and warm fingers around her bare wrist, a familiar hint of saddle leather and softly expensive aftershave, and when she turned it was to meet concern in dark hazelly-green eyes.

“I have to do this,” she said firmly, twisting her hand to indicate that she wanted him to release her, but he shook his head.

“I won't let you,” he said simply, and that he  _assumed_ that he would be able to made her blood boil. “It will ruin you, Sansa – Necromancer or no, you're no murderer. I know you're not.”

“You don't know anything about me,” she said, and then he slipped his arm around her waist and drew her close. “You can't- Willas, stop this, Willas-”

“Ssh,” he murmured against her mouth. “Ssh, now, you know I'm right.”

She breathed deep, tucked her face against his neck, and bit down on his collarbone.

“We'll get them back for this,” he whispered into her hair. “Trust me, sweetheart, we  _will_ get back at them – but not like this. We prove Mist was behind your family's deaths, and we go through the other Elders. You know it's the only way.”

“I can't wait that long,” she said, voice stilted. “She set her creatures on my mother-”

“I know,” he assured her. “But you and I need to wait and prove that it was her, you know that. Until then-”

“Until then, we do as Elder Ravel asks, and we run Professor Grouse's hospital. I know.”


	3. The Sisters Grimm - Ferryport Landing

“Old Irish legend,” Relda Grimm whispers, and Sansa rolls her eyes – their story was told beyond Ireland, for all that it was their home. “The Wolf Maid and her Summer Prince.”

Willas pulls the straps of his brace tighter, jaw set hard, and refuses to look up. He hates hearing their story told, hates especially that he is shown to such poor advantage in it.

“Stop,” Sansa soothes him, dropping to her knees and removing his brace entirely, setting it aside for a moment so she can massage his knee back to something approaching normal. “You'll only hurt yourself, and now is not the time for that, love.”

He twists a hand into her hair as she carefully settles his brace back in place, and then accepts her help in getting to his feet.

“The Bastard is with them,” he whispers, pulling her close and pressing his brow to hers. “If he gets near us, I want you to run, Sansa. I want you to live, even if-”

“Don't you dare,” she snaps sharply, pressing her fingers to his lips. “You are not allowed to die, you foolish man – I made that choice for you, don't you remember?”

And he does, they both do – everyone remembers Niamh Chinn Óir and Oisín, but none remember Sansa Rua and her prince. The autumn princess, the wolf maid, who fell in love with a short-lived mortal and bound her life to his, who spurned a god for a man, is forgotten, but she lives on while the rest have faded.

“I promised that I would die with you,” she reminds him, pressing closer, “and I have never been one to break my word, remember.”

“Nor I mine,” he admits, “but these are not usual circumstances. Our own people are hunting us, Sansa, and I need you to live.”

Cinderella's delicate cough draws Sansa out of her and Willas' little bubble, and Sansa forces a smile.

“I'll be back soon, love,” she promises, leaning up enough to kiss him and ignorning Puck's retching in the background. “Stay alive for me?”

“And you for me,” he says back, but he smiles and pulls her in for one last kiss before letting her go. “Keep away from him, sweetling – he will never stop hating us.”


	4. The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel - San Francisco

“Nicholas and Perenelle have arrived in the city,” Sansa said, and while her eyes were sad her voice held only acceptance. “I expect we shall have a visit from that horrible little man any day now.”

“Doctor Dee,” Willas sighed, but he smiled at the twist of rosemary suddenly in the air as the flowers on the table brightened and bloomed a little stronger. Sansa's aura was as strong as his own, but he much prefered her scent to his. “I don't suppose he'd accept it if we pinned a sign to the door with “Sorry, we've gone out!” on it, do you?”

“I rather think not,” she laughed, finishing with the flowers and moving to stand before him. “Did we make the right choice, do you think? In accepting immortality?”

“I hope so,” he admitted. “Aside from those times when we are unlucky enough to end up in the same city as the Flamels for more than a month or so, we have had a good life, have we not? And we have done so much, love, so much that we would not have been capable of had we not become what we are now.”

Dark Elders with almost-gold auras and others with almost-silver, others who smelled of sea-salt and still more who smelled like dead winter, all held back and kept from the world with Sansa and Willas' help.

“Some find immortality without an Elder,” he said, “but that is... Frightening, I think,” he went on thoughtfully, pulling her close and breathing in the scent of her hair, rosemary from her aura and a faint hint of lilac from her soap. “Beholden to none, nigh invincible should we choose to take certain roads? I don't think I could bear that.”

“Still,” she whispered, tucking her face against his neck. “We have seen so much death, Willas. So many people we loved are gone.”

“And we have made new friends,” he pointed out, although he knew what she meant, knew who she meant, but they had long ago given up on having more children because the pain was just as exquisitely overwhelming every time they watched their sons and daughters die. “We have protected our families for generations beyond our own.”

“And we have never to lose one another,” she added, squirming closer and slipping her warm hands under his shirt to settle on the small of his back, just to touch and reassure herself that yes, immortal or no, he was still human, and that must mean that she was, too. “I do not think I could survive a single day without you, you know.”

“Nor I you,” he sighed, looking out the window across San Francisco Bay and wondering what madness the Flamels would bring down on the world this time – because if there was one thing that immortality had assured him of, it was that madness followed in Nicholas Flamel's footsteps (often, it was too afraid of Perenelle to risk following in hers).

 


	5. Alex Rider - Liverpool Street, London

“You'll kill her!” he exploded, but Alan Blunt simply raised an eyebrow and shrugged.

“She was made aware of the risks when the opportunity to participate in our business was presented to her,” he said blandly, and Will wanted to reach across the table and wring Blunt's scrawny neck. Only Mrs. Jones' presence stopped him, that and the fact that Sansa had just been sent into fucking Underage Trafficking Central, down Scunthorpe.

“Alex Rider was made aware of the risks,” he said through gritted teeth. “But you made it so he couldn't say no to you. I was made aware of the risks, and you used my family as leverage against me. Sansa has been made aware of the risks, yes, but you know damn well that she's become reckless since you failed to find her brothers and sister. She has nothing left to live for, and now that you've sent her down Bozzie's, she's going to throw herself into the ring and get herself sold off and raped and killed just to get you some fucking information.”

“That is the job,” Blunt pointed out, and Will tossed his file across the table before pushing himself from the room – he'd been shot point-blank in the spine during a mission, severing his spinal cord and leaving him with absolutely nothing from his third lumbar vertebra down. Alan Blunt had sent him a small box of Quality Street and a note offering a place at an Oxford college of his choice and a desk job once he was qualified. He'd taken both, in the hopes of saving kids from a fate like his own – they'd officially stopped using underage agents since Alex Rider had blown up in their faces so spectacularly, but in espionage “official” just meant “we do tell the government some of it”.

Sansa Stark was the latest edition, the second girl – beautiful and charming and deadly, five years Will's junior at seventeen, fast outliving her usefullness as a junior agent, an orphan whose only surviving siblings had recently been declared legally dead. Sansa insisted that they were alive, but no searches had turned up anything, not even the ones Will insisted Smithers run.

And Sansa, masquerading as Alayne Stone, with her glorious hair dyed something the same colour as Will's own, had just managed to get herself sold into sex-slavery. Her contact-cam was still working, at least, and her microchip hadn't been detected, so they were still getting audio, but she was too close, far too close, and he had to get her out.

Will had entered Oxford at sixteen, graduated at nineteen and entered the service two months later (after recovering from a failed operation which should have repaired some of the damage to his spine), and Sansa had been recruited not six months later. He'd done his best to guard her since she was fifteen, done his best to keep her safe because he couldn't stand the thought of another kid ending up like him.

His only consolation was that his brothers and sisters were safe, thanks to the work he'd done. There was literally no other bright side to this, and seeing Sansa in such overt danger was quickly overshadowing even that goodness.

“Smithers?” he called, backing into the workshop. “I think it's high time we arrange a little surprise for Sansa's hosts, don't you?”


	6. Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Camp Half-Blood

Charlie elbowed Will sharply in the ribs, grinning under all the soot on his face. How his face was still sooty after two showers and a dunk in the lake, Will would never know.

“Pretty little thing, isn't she?” he teased, and Will thumped his brother as hard as he could in the kidney to make him shut up. “Silena was just saying-”

“Shut up, Chaz,” he groaned, tucking his crutches under his arms and turning to go - they'd been taking advantage of their status as counsellors, and had spent Hepheastus' archery practice lying in the cool grass by the lake sunning themselves. “Bad enough I have everyone else making fun of me over it without you. You're supposed to be on my side.”

“Where's the fun in that?” Charlie laughed, jumping up and steadying Will when he tried – and failed – to put some weight on his bad leg. “Come on, back to the cabin with you, and we'll try out the new brace tonight before dinner.”

“Like I tried to tell you,” Charlie went on brightly, clapping Will on the back. “Silena was saying that Sansa's apparently never had a proper boyfriend, just some creepy stalker, so even a loser like you should be a step up.”

“How does Silena even know that? I wouldn't know something like that about you, and we've been at camp together since we were what, six? Sansa's been here all of four months.”

“They apparently play a lot of truth-or-dare in Aphrodite cabin,” Charlie said sagely. “Silena says that that's how she asked me out – she was dared to, because someone else figured she liked me.”

Will rolled his eyes, heaving himself up the slope beside his brother, and forced himself not to stare when the Aphrodite girls flew past again.

“Come on,” Charlie groaned, helping him down the jump between grass and gravel. “You're allowed to look, bro – nobody's going to think you're weird, I swear. Everyone knows Sansa's got that thing, the one that makes everyone think they're in love with her – they'll just think you're more susceptible than most is all.”

“I'm not in love with her,” Will snapped, but he knew he was blushing and he knew that Charlie knew he only blushed when he was lying. “Shut up, Chaz.”

“All I'm saying is, you might want to ask her out before Luke does – guy was eyeing her up like crazy during capture the flag last month.”

Will bit his lip – he couldn't play capture the flag, hadn't been able to in almost a year, not since a prototype for a flying chariot had gone spectacularly wrong with him and Charlie on board. Charlie had broken his collarbone and been out of commision for a few weeks – Will had crushed his left leg and was still out of everything. Luke Castellan had made some throwaway comment about how appropriate it was for Hepheastus cabin to have a mascot cripple with a leg to match their dad's, and while nobody had even laughed much, the cripple thing had stuck with Will and wrecked whatever little confidence he'd built back up since the crash.

“Dumbass,” he growled, swinging along quicker in an effort to get away from even the thought of perfect damn Luke Castellan. “She was probably looking back, too. All the girls look at Luke.”

“Not Silena,” Charlie pointed out, still grinning that big shit-eating grin of his. “Look, ask the girl out – the worst she can do is say no, right?”

“She's a child of Aphrodite, Chaz! The worst she could do is invoke her mom and have me cursed to be an eternal bachelor!”


	7. Charlie Bone - Somewhere in the Heights

He leaned back against the pillows and watched the red seep to the ends of Sansa's hair even as her hair coiled and twisted into tight corkscrew curls the colour of butter.

“You know this isn't necessary,” he said, pushing himself up onto his elbows as her nose turned up and rounded at the end and her soft mouth tightened and thinned. “We'll be perfectly safe now mad Ezekiel isn't around to try experimenting on us anymore.”

“Better safe than sorry,” Sansa said, opening her eyes at last. Her eyes were always reassuringly bright blue, the only part of her appearance that she couldn't change, for whatever reason, and full of the determination that had intimidated him when they met all those years before, her in Drama and him in Music and both doing their homework under that blasted portrait of the Red King.

“Sansa-”

“I'm not risking you again,” she said firmly. “Not after what happened last time, Willas. I can't risk you like that, not again. It'd kill me if anything happened to you.”

“Sansa, you know Paton Yewbeam, and we were at school with Lyell Bone. We can trust them, sweetheart.”

“I don't trust anyone,” she said. “Not where you or the kids are concerned, you know that.”

As if on cue, Leyton and Olwyn knocked on the door, poking their heads around without waiting for an answer.

“Off to check the school, Mum?” Olwyn asked cheerfully, recognisable only by eyes the same summer blue as Sansa's, her usual tangle of glossy brown curls straightened and darkened and slicked, her freckly skin icy-pale. “Can we stop off at Ingledew's on the way home?”

Sansa touched the tips of her fingers to Willas' face, between the edge of his beard and the uneven scar under his eye.

“We'll be back soon,” she promised. “Try to understand, love? After everything the Bloors and the Yewbeams and their friends have done over the years-”

“Alright, then,” he sighed. “But be safe. Change if you think someone's following, and call me from Ingledew's, hmm? I'll feel better knowing you're not trapped in old Ezekiel's laboratory.”

They shuddered at the memories, and then Sansa and Olwyn disappeared out the door and Leyton turned to Willas, frowning a little.

“Feel like trying your crutches today?”


	8. Stardust 1.0 - Faerie

“You try walking bloody miles on a broken leg!” he roared, and Sansa hesitated – he was right, she supposed, and it was mightily unfair of her to expect him to be gracious with her, given that she had, after all, chained him to her and bullied him into doing what she wanted.

“I apologise,” she said quite sincerely, settling onto her knees beside him under the tree. “I'm afraid my knowledge of healing and things is limited to the little brown bottles in my mother's medicine box and good boiled linen bandages, and I don't have either of those here.”

“Your world looks wonderful from way up high,” he grumped, folding his arms and looking down at his leg, which was twisted all wrong and which looked really quite painful, now Sansa thought about it. “But now that I'm here, I'd really quite like to go home, I think.”

Sansa had never heard of a fallen star going back into the sky, so she said nothing.

“I suppose you think that's very stupid,” he said bitterly, “but I don't think it's even the slightest bit stupider than you believing that the sort of cad who'd send a defenseless young woman off into a place that everyone he knows thinks of as the very depths of hell to force her to prove her love is the sort of man you should be marrying.”

“What would you know of love?” she demanded haughtily. “You, sir, are a star, and I don't imagine you had a great deal of time for love what with all that twinkling and shining and forming constellations.”

“My brothers and sisters will miss me, I think,” he said, all the anger gone and replaced by a terrible gloominess that made Sansa horribly sad for him. “Please leave me alone.”

“I can't,” Sansa insisted, and then she sighed. “But please don't be sad – just as soon as I show you at home, we can set about finding a way to get you back into the sky-”

“That is a lovely offer,” he said, shaking his head, “but stars fall, I'm afraid – it's a one-way ticket.”


	9. Stardust 2.0 - "Stormhold" (movie 'verse)

“Sansa,” she said at last, sniffling and dabbing at her reddened eyes with the cuff of one silvery sleeve. “My name. It's Sansa.”

He looked up from tying off the last length of shirt holding his splint in place, surprised she had opened her mouth at all – she hadn't said a word since insisting that he get right off her this instant.

“That's one of the stars in the Ice Wolf,” he said thoughtlessly, and then looked at her again. “Oh, goodness, I am sorry, I didn't mean-”

“My brothers and sister,” she sighed. “They will just have to shine all the brighter, now that I've fallen.”

He pulled himself upright on his makeshift crutches, and then offered her his hand as best he could.

“I wasn't expecting you to be a lady,” he admitted shyly, “and that rather changes things, I suppose – might I assist you to somewhere more comfortable?”


	10. The Supernaturalist - Satellite City

“So who is she, anyways? You sounded as if you knew when you said we had to bring her.”

Sansa kept her eyes closed – she didn't know who it was that had found her, just knew that they'd brought those blue things with them, she saw that before she passed out – and waited until she could make an effort to identify the people speaking.

“Sansa Stark,” said a girl's voice. “Her whole family were wiped out just now – Lannister up at Miyishi didn't like the way her pop was digging around, didn't want to risk any of the rest of them continuing even if he was taken out of the equation.”

“She's awake,” said a third person, another male. “Hello, Sansa.”

Sansa opened her eyes.

Her first thought was to wonder why on Earth Tyrion Lannister was sitting by her bedside.

“Lucien Bonn,” he offered. “Bartoli Baby – call me Ditto.”

“A pleasure,” she croaked, surprised by how raw her throat was. “Sansa Stark – although you clearly know that already. If you hope to hold me to ransom, I hope you know that there's no one left to pay it if my family really is dead.”

He grinned.

“These are Mona Vasquez and Cosmo Hill.”

Sansa nodded to the girl, but eyed the boy curiously, wondering which-

“Clarissa Frayne,” he said before she could ask. “Was it the name that gave it away?”

“My parents adopted an orphan,” she said. “Jon Snow, he was found down the back of Snowline Park.”

A crash echoed in from beyond Sansa's little cell, and she jerked back in surprise.

Mr. Bonn slid down from his chair and looked out the opening.

“Alright, Will?” he called, and the muffled reply was apparently an affirmative, because he shrugged and came back in. “He'll be fine, he just hates his crutches.”

“He's been on them near two years,” Ms. Vasquez said, rolling her eyes. “Guy's gotta get used to them sooner or later.”

“That sort of thing is always later with Will,” Mr. Hill said with a small smile. “He'll be fine, you know he will.”

Sansa cleared her throat, drawing their attention back to her. Mr. Bonn – Ditto, was it he'd said? What an odd nickname – smiled and lifted himself back into his chair by her bedside.

“Before you passed out,” he said. “Do you remember much?”

“Paralegals,” she said. “Gunfire. My mother screaming, Dad's head-”

She shuddered, unable to stand remembering that particular scene, and blinked rapidly a half dozen times.

“Anything blue stand out to you?” Ms. Vasquez asked, and Sansa's jaw dropped.

“They're real?”

“Oh, hey,” came a fourth voice from outside her cubicle. “Has anyone-”

Sansa looked up at Willas Tyrell, her friend's older brother who had been missing for nearly two years, and promptly fainted from the sheer strangeness of the situation.


	11. The Wildenstern Saga - The Wildenstern Mansion

_Duchess of Leinster._

It was not a position Sansa had ever presumed to occupy – she had had four brothers, after all, and an uncle as well, and her father had been as healthy a man as there was in the world – but here she was, alone and lonely in Winterfell, with only her title for company amidst the army of security and staff.

Dublin was a smokey smudge just a little ways north, and she almost wished that she lived in the city. She wondered if the hustle and bustle would drown out the screams and whispers in her head, and wondered if that smokey air would hide the stench of blood that she fancied trailed in her footsteps. She leaned further out the window of Father's study – _no, my study now –_ and breathed deep, looking down at the ground so many feet far below. Father's first wife, Jon's mother, had thrown herself to her death from this very window, and Sansa wondered if it was an example she ought follow.

_I will not be the last of my line_ she promised herself, moving back and pulling the window shut firmly in her wake.

There was to be a ball tonight – according to her advisors, it was a means for her to find a husband to _help her rule_ , meaning they wanted her to meet the man they had chosen to become Duke of Leinster by wedding her. Sansa meant to use it to discover who was loyal and who was not, in truth, although as she did not trust even one of her advisors, save old Luwin, who had been Father's manservant and now acted as her personal secretary, and Lady Maege and Lord Wyman, who had yet to offer suspicious advice.

There were eligible bachelors coming from all across Europe, too – Van Der Bilts and Oswins and Tyrells and Bismarks and all sorts of others from families with the _aurea sanitas,_ something Sansa never wanted anything else to do with, because it was in others pursuing that God forsaken _thing_ that her family had been ruined.

They were all here, now, staying in her home, eating her food and abusing her hospitality. Rudolf von Bismark had attempted to corner her in the elevator just this morning, and only sweet Harwin's intervention had saved her. Silena Van Der Bilt seemed to have made it her business to disparage everything Sansa said or did, and David and Emmeline Oswin, blasted twins that they were, kept doing that queer thing where they watched her, exchanged a single look, and tittered between themselves.

The Tyrells, from Marseilles, were at least gracious guests, and in the form of the eldest of them she had found the only other person she knew who had both the _aurea sanitas_ and debilitating injuries beyond a missing limb or eye, or something age related. Willas Tyrell had as much movement in his left knee as she had in her right shoulder, and it was oddly comforting to not be the only freak in the country for just a little while.

"Your Grace?" Luwin called quietly from the door. "A letter has just arrived from Lord Tully and Sir Brynden – it would appear that they are unable to attend."

Sansa had expected as much, because her uncle and grand-uncle rarely came to see her at all, because she had overheard them speaking of how painful it was to see her when she looked so much like her mother, and while it infuriated her, she was too tired to be truly angry.

"Very well," she said, sitting behind the vast desk of polished silver birch and drawing the seating plan towards herself. "I suppose we had best rearrange the tables, hadn't we? Someone will likely take offence at anyone else being given Edmure and the rests' places."


	12. The Inheritance Cycle - Ellesmera, Du Weldenvarden

 “I will live forever, compared with you,” she says quietly, her eternal eyes bright with tears. “No, that is a lie – if I were to give in, I would die with you. I could not bear to go on without you, I don't think.”

Willas' wounds should be aching, but presently there is nothing on his mind but the sweet warmth of Sansa's fingers tracing his features and the soft music of her voice as she quietly breaks his heart.

“I am a Rider,” he points out. “Even dragonless Riders-”

He closes his mouth, the grief for Rosaria striking him dumb, and it is a long silence before he can speak again.

“Even those like me live long lives,” he carries on. “I am not going to die in thirty years, Sansa. You know that – is it that you do not feel anything for me? Is this an attempt at, at letting me down gently?”

“I feel altogether too much for you, foolish boy,” she snaps harshly, folding her arms tight under her breasts and leaning away from him. “Are you so blind that you do not see it? You think you know all there is to know, but you forget that you are a _child_ by the standards of my people! You have never known love-”

“Not before now,” he concedes, “but I do now. I do not think any could deny that.”

No, none could deny it, not after him and Rosaria flying back into Illiria to save her, not when he gave everything but his life for a faint hope of her living. 

“We are different races, Willas,” she says softly, her anger apaprently gone. “Different cultures, different _everything_ – why do you persist at this? It will only bring pain to us both.”

“It needn't,” he presses, not daring even to lift his arm to touch her for fear of tearing the burns on his back. Rosaria's heart-of-hearts is warm between his hip and the wall, warm and entirely silent, and Sansa is warm between him and the door, but the heat of his ruined skin is horrifying, and almost enough to distract him from what must be said. “I love you, and I ask nothing but your company for what years I will yet live. Is that truly too much?”

“Far too much,” she whispers, ducking her head so all her wonderful, flaming hair tumbles down to hide her face. “You ask me to remain close to you, knowing how difficult that will be for me? You tell me you love me, knowing that those words mean something altogether more to my people than to yours? I am not human, but I am still a person, Willas, I still face the same longings and desires as you!”

“I am yours entirely,” he says honestly, in far too much pain now to care how horrible it is to tell her all this and know that she does not want him, not really. “I have no family left, no dragon, I can't walk, and I don't yet know if I can access my magic or if I am crippled, like Master Oromis – all I have left, though, I give to you. It is little, beyond what knowledge I have collected, which doubtless pales in comparison to your own, but it is yours if you will have it.”

Her hand is cool on his bare chest, above his bandages, over his heart.

“This is what you would give to me,” she tells him, “and that is a gift to great for any one person to accept, my brave, foolish boy. Far too great a gift for me to accept.”


End file.
